What Is Search Engine Marketing?

How can SEO help you attract new business?

The definition in Wikipedia states "Search engine marketing, or SEM, is a form of Internet marketing that seeks to promote websites by increasing their visibility in search engine result pages (SERPs) through the use of search engine optimization, paid placement, contextual advertising, and paid inclusion."

So let's break it down into it's component parts.

Search engine results page - basically there are two places that your website can appear when someone conducts a search - either under the natural or organic search engine results, or within the paid listings or sponsored links.

In general terms organic listings are more trusted and better quality than paid for listings. They are usually there on merit and quality of content whereas the paid for listings are there because someone is bidding on a particular search term.

To influence your position within the organic results you need to focus on or partake in some search engine optimisation. This is a regualar and consistent approach to developing and improving the performance of your web site and usually involved some of or all of the following elements: